Quarterstaff: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

The party's last torch had gone out, and they killed Setmoth in the dark.

     

Quarterstaff

United States

Simulated Environmental Systems (1987 developer and publisher)
Infocom (1988 re-developer and publisher; with subtitle Tomb of Setmoth)

Released in 1987, 1988 for Macintosh

Date Started: 29 November 2017

Date ended: 19 December 2017

Total hours: 14

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting:110/274 (40%)

When I last wrote, I had explored about 75% of the game. I wasn't stuck on anything, but I was getting frustrated juggling a huge inventory that I wasn't sure I'd ever use. That never went away.

It turned out there were three more NPCs who could potentially join my party. The first was Dirk, a thievery-oriented character waiting in a "dark chamber" behind a secret door opened by pulling some torches. Waiting too long, it seems, because when I entered the chamber, Dirk was dead. An inspection of his body suggested he'd died of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, or all three. I guess if you're not there to say EAT, DRINK, and SLEEP, NPCs--even if they haven't joined your party yet--just die.

Later, in a throne room, I encountered a dwarf warrior named Sandra and an NPC named Piffer. I have no idea what Piffer's strengths or weaknesses are because I never got him or her to join my party. He or she ignored round after round of SMILE, GREET, and BRIBE (the latter being the only thing I ever found to do with all these valuables). Sandra was pretty useful.
      

A big text dump upon entering the throne room. Whose throne? That's not really clear.

      

As I approached the final areas in my first game, my characters were pretty beat up. They were suffering from thirst and starvation and were out of food and water. Piffer not only hadn't joined my party, she'd been killed by an enemy. Sandra was on her last legs after a battle with someone named "Tarmac." I decided to just start over completely and try to get to the end in better shape. This time, I made it to Dirk alive and got both him and Sandra to join me. Still no luck with Piffer.

These NPCs would be interesting if they had any kind of backstory. Instead, they just join your party after a lot of smiling and greeting but offer no dialogue or even explanation for their presence.

The same is true of your enemies. The endgame areas brought some tough combats. A guy named Trinot attacked me in a throne room when I fussed with one of the throne's gems. I had to split my party to kill him so he wouldn't regard any one of us as the "leader." He had a trident and wore a Cloak of Protection that I was happy to loot. But who was he? Who, for that matter, was Tarmac, who attacked me with a "dancing sword" when I put a black gem in a demon's mouth? I can't shake a feeling that I missed some commands that would have given me more backstory on both NPCs and foes, but I've been over the documentation, and I just don't see anything.

The game's strength remained in its complex puzzles. There was the typical Infocom navigation puzzle at one point, as I tried to sort out the exits from a series of rooms with near-identical names--Misty Room, Smokey Room, Foggy Room, Fog Chamber, Smokey Chamber, Smoke Room, etc.--where the passages seemed to have no logic to them. To get into the throne room, I had to put a blue ball into a small hole, a solution referenced ages ago in the "wild wizard's" ransom note.
        

There was no way to make this area clear.

      

There was one puzzle that I bungled, although I guess I shouldn't say that because my solution worked. There was an area with a locked door and a grue on the other side. Apparently, I was supposed to drink a "thick potion" that would transfer me to the grue's body, allowing me to unlock the door from the other side and drop some useful items, then transport back to my own body, open the door, and collect the treasure. I just smashed the door open and killed the grue.
 

Infuriatingly, the game doesn't give an image or description of the grue other than it's "nasty."

      

Another puzzle I maddeningly had to look up a hint for. The "dark chamber" in which Dirk was found had a bunch of spell reagents: bat's brains, hydra blood, toad's eyes, calf's brains, goat's bladder, and the like. After the tangle of smoke rooms, I found myself at a pentagram. A scrawled note read:

        

Star of flames

Multi-headed breather of flames

Make its blood like its breath

You must seek your death

Thrust quick to thy heart

Tis dour doing but our part

Take the key from the trap

'Ware the plaque where it be

Come what may, come what might

There's sure to be a dirty fight

Whether fair, whether foul

Expect the worst to be on the prowl

       

Annoyingly, I figured out most of it. "The multi-headed breather of flames" is of course a hydra. The ritual wanted me to use the hydra's blood and to "make its blood like its breath" by setting it on fire. I would then have to sacrifice myself on the pentagram. The part I was missing was the need to ENTER the pentagram. Anyway, the ritual brought me to another dimension where I retrieved the "tomb room key"--one of the few truly essential items in the game--and then sacrificed myself on an analogous pentagram to return to the real world.
      

I wish I'd gotten this without help.

     

The game culminated in a battle with Setmoth at his titular tomb. For those wondering who "Setmoth" is, that's a fair question. At one point, I found his diary. It related how he, "mightiest being who has ever existed," came to the "plane of Threa" and conquered it. He made every king his slave and tortured and killed everyone who displeased him. Soon, he grew restless and decided to conquer "all the thousand planes," fearing only the powers of the plane of Agood.

One of his lieutenants, Dresf, joined forces with the powers of Agood and slaughtered Setmoth's armies. Setmoth killed the rest of his own followers to gain power from their souls, then retreated to a safe place "until time and place meet again for another battlefield." He ends the diary by encouraging the reader to "awaken your master, Setmoth, the one you were born to worship."
      

Setmoth's diary lays it all out.

     

Cool story, bro, but none of it really makes any sense. Is "Threa" supposed to be the world I'm in now? 'Cause the manual gives it as Rhea, which is close but not the same. And--spoiler alert--my party is about to open Setmoth's tomb and kill him. But why would we open it in the first place? How did he lock himself in the tomb from the inside? What does he have to do with the disappearance of the Tree Druids, since he doesn't seem to have escaped yet? Does anyone even remember the Tree Druids? They haven't been referenced since, like, the fourth room.
      

None of this is explained when you finally meet Setmoth. He's a tough customer. I had to split my party again to keep him from focusing on a single character. I distributed potions of healing among my party members and had them flee from the tomb and quaff the potions if their hit points got too low. Even then, it took me a couple of reloads to defeat him. When I did, I got the brief message--no graphic, even--at the top of the screen. I don't really feel like I "completed my mission," since I didn't solve the mystery of what happened to the Druids. Is it as simple as they accidentally broke into Setmoth's old stomping grounds? I suppose that's the most plausible explanation. But if Setmoth wasn't free yet, what actually happened to them?
      

Setmoth had a badass entrance.

     

Looking over my map and notes, it's clear that a ton of the game world was unnecessary, serving only to supply the party with items of questionable use. The number of "treasure" items that have no purpose is baffling. Why did the developers fool the party into loading up on gems and jewelry for no reason except perhaps to bribe a couple NPCs into compliance?

Infocom's promotions of the game are heavy with the letters "RPG," suggesting a bold new direction for the company. In the end, that's something of a joke. The game is barely an RPG. Beyond Zork did a better job with real RPG elements. This one has some extremely limited character development that mysteriously stops after a few combats and a bit of flexibility in inventory choices but no way to tell which items are better than others.
      
Again, I eagerly await The Adventure Gamer's judgement, but as an RPG, I have to call it a misfire. It would be interesting if more CRPGs went in this direction, offering highly atmospheric rooms instead of featureless corridors--smaller, more detailed dungeons that take longer to complete because you have to carefully explore every feature. That could be cool. But I would want that approach within in the context of good CRPG combat, inventory, and character development mechanics.
     

Sandra's proficiencies. My characters never got out of the low-40s.

    
In a GIMLET, Quarterstafff earns:

• 3 points for the game world. The backstory is somewhat original and seems to be pointing towards an original quest, but the game itself delivers so little lore or plot exposition that the backstory might as well not exist.

     

A warning not to disturb Setmoth. I honestly don't even know when the game switched from druids to dwarves.

      

• 1 point for character creation and development. There's no creation. "Development" consists of some slight increases in skill as you fight, but mysteriously the increases stop after a few battles. This is a key element of an RPG that the game simply didn't implement at all. Encounters don't even really play differently with different characters.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. It's cool that you can get them to join the party, but the game needed a dialogue system.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The foes are nothing special--enemies of different names, some hitting harder than others. I give most of the points for the decent navigation, logical, and inventory puzzles. But there are no role-playing encounters such as a true RPG would offer.

       

The party doesn't get very far greeting and smiling at Setmoth, but he did accept our gift!

       

• 3 points for magic and combat. There are magic items, but no spellcasting system. Combat is mostly just KILL ENEMY over and over. But I do give it some credit for a missile weapon system that allows you to attack enemies in the next room, which is a kind of "tactic," as is the ability to split the party.

• 3 points for equipment. The strengths are a large variety and evocative item descriptions. There's even a bit of a puzzle involving how to use the "Identify Wand" to tell what potions, scrolls, keys, and wands do (though I never found an unidentified wand, and the uses of keys were pretty obvious). What the game lacks is any real utility to most of its items and any statistics to help you evaluate their relative worth.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest with no role-playing options, no alternate endings, and no side quests.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Some of the graphics were well-drawn and detailed. I didn't hear a lick of sound during the game, but I read a review that said there's at least a "death scream." Perhaps an emulator issue? If someone can confirm that it has sound and describe it, I might give an extra point here. The interface has good points and bad points. The menus are a nice addition to the text parser, which otherwise has Infocom's strengths. But I didn't love the methods of arbitrating the actions of multiple party members, and I would have rather had a fixed interface than these Mac windows. The automap is nice.

• 4 points for gameplay. It's more linear that it seems at first, but the challenge level and length are about right. I can't see any reason to replay it.

          

That gives us a final score of 25, again something of a failure by RPG standards, but adventure game aficionados might like it more.
     

Setmoth was menacing, but I don't think he was quite that big. Note that Infocom not only stresses that this is an "RPG" but spells out what that means.

      

Most of the reviews I'm finding, both contemporary and modern, disagree. Dragon gave it 5/5 stars and called it "among the finest fantasy role-playing games for any system" and "the most true-to-form [role-playing game] we've found." The February 1989 QuestBusters praised how well it "captures the mood and feel of non-computerized fantasy role-playing." I do understand what they're talking about. The dungeon is well-designed, and there's a constant tension as your party moves from room to room and encounters each new puzzle. Successful characters in the game act like tabletop characters, moving slowly, investigating everything, knocking on walls for secret doors, and so forth. That's unquestionably the strength of the game. But it isn't what I'm addicted to and, let's face it, not what by 1987 we've come to understand is an "RPG" when applied to a computer game.

I spent some time with the earlier version of the game and didn't notice a lot of differences with the map or the major puzzles. The automap looks the same, but there are fewer graphical interludes. The first version does't have the "Identify Wand" and associated puzzle with the game documentation; you just have to figure out items through experimentation. Eolene and Bruno start with Titus; the cell behind the chief torturer and druid guard has a "crazy druid" rather than Eolene. Combats take a lot longer, with much more missing, and poison does significantly more damage. The interface is more annoying, with incomplete menus (unlike the Infocom version, you can't see every object in the room from the menus) and fewer parser shortcuts. The game doesn't assume that you open a door if you go in a direction that has a door, for instance. You have to take a turn to open it. I didn't get far enough to encounter any of the famous bugs.

        

I totally forgot that the Infocom version had a "help" window until after I won. That could have been useful.

       

For all the effort spent by Infocom building this up as their first big foray into the RPG market, they didn't really seem to get much momentum out of it. 1989's Journey: The Quest Begins (link to my review) shows some lessons from Quarterstaff, including juggling party of adventurers and constructing sentences by selecting menu commands instead of just typing. (I'll always remember that game as establishing that "grues" are the same thing as "orcs.") But that was less of an RPG than this one. As a commenter recently pointed out, they also attempted an adventure/RPG hybrid on the NES called Tombs & Treasure (1991), an update of a Japanese game. By then, Infocom wasn't really Infocom anymore, the Cambridge staff having been laid off by Activision in 1989. Activision has periodically re-released compilations of the old Infocom adventures (the most recent in 2012) but has otherwise largely abandoned the label.

As for the original developers, Simulated Environmental Systems doesn't appear to have worked on any other games, and neither did authors Scott D. Schmitz or Kenneth M. Updike. Mr. Schmitz left a comment recently, so if he sticks with my series to the end, perhaps he'll talk about the game's background, where life took him, and which one of the two was a fan of Welsh mythology. I hope he's not raw at the poor review. It's a good game for its genre, but that genre--despite Infocom's promotions--is not CRPG.

Spirit of Adventure, Flesh of Vulnerability

Life sucks so much that the adventurers turn to drugs.

       

Spirit of Adventure offers a nice challenge during its opening chapters, perhaps equal to the first Might and Magic. You start in a sprawling city and you have to find key services behind unmarked doors. You can only save at the monastery (at least, at first). Combats are rare, but challenging enough that you lose quite often--and reloading is no fun because there's no way (that I've found) to bypass the opening animation. You spend most of the gold you earn on healing, only occasionally saving enough beyond that for a weapon or armor upgrade.

      

You quickly learn the strengths and weaknesses of the base-level enemies, as well as what rewards they offer. Bats are to be fled--too much effort for not enough experience. Ditto skull spiders; curing poison costs too much. If you face a party of gnomes, switch to all-mental attacks. Cheer when you confront a group of dwarves; they have a ton of gold.

       

A combat with a dwarf produces an unreasonably large gold haul for the experience.

     

But you can't stay in the city forever, because the only place to level up is somewhere out in the wilderness. So are the only places to create spells, and without a magic system, it feels like you're still playing a demo. You load up on rations and reluctantly hit the wilderness, where combats are deadlier and more frequent.

The game walks a razor's edge. If combat was slightly more difficult or slightly less rewarding, I'd probably be lambasting the game for being impossible. It also helps that I discovered the level-up location fairly early in my explorations. If it had taken me much longer to find it, the balance of enjoyment may have tipped. I could easily see another player hating the game if luck had gone the other way.

A couple of things made the game a little easier since my last entry. First, I started over, declining to purchase the useless book this time, and spent the money on armor instead. It took some experimentation to figure out what armor each class could wear, but once I had everyone suited in ring mail, hard leather, soft leather, gloves, gauntlets, and boots, it made a big difference in the survivability of multiple combats.

     

Note how the encounter text is drawn directly from The Bard's Tale.

      

Second, I took the time to learn what the magic skills do and how to activate them. Magic skills are independent of the spellcasting system. Every character, every class, starts with one magic skill (selected randomly) and gets more while leveling up. Each does something beneficial while active, though some of them have a cost.

My Amazon, Orithia, came with "Wielder," which simply increases the power of physical combat, at no particular cost. Hanzo the Samurai and Aibell the Banshee both started with "Merge," which adds physical and mental attributes together when calculating combat rolls, but at the cost of 1 hit point damage for every successful attack. Titania the fairy has "Charm," which supposedly makes NPCs more friendly. Maugris the magician came with "Sealer," which reduces the damage from mental attacks, and Tapati the goddess started with "Mirror," which reflects magic attacks at the cost of 2 magic points. I wasn't doing anything with magic points at the beginning of the game anyway. Activating these skills made a big difference in combat.

     

My magician and his skills after a couple of levels.

      

As I started to explore the overworld, I decided that the number of pixels on the map was too many to try to explore systematically in rows or columns. Instead, I went with the hypothesis that key locations would correlate with obvious physical features on the map, like mounds or copses of trees. I was partly right, and I found the Castle of Attic, where you level up, almost immediately in a small forest to the west of Moon City. However, during the rest of my explorations, I only found two other locations--a dungeon called Rialdo's Castle and a rune temple--so perhaps there are more cities and dungeons in random locations than I thought.

      

It's hard to see, but little icons for castles and temples have appeared in places I discovered them.

      

The only thing to do at the Castle of Attic--named after the development company--is to level up. It takes 1,000 experience points to get from Level 1 to 2, and only another 1,000 to get from 2 to 3. It takes 2,000 to go from 3 to 4. It's Fibonacci leveling, maybe. Much of this session was spent grinding to Level 3.

Leveling up confers hit point, mental point, and magic point bonuses, a bonus to a random attribute, and a new skill. There are only slots for 6 skills, so that has to slow down or stop at some point. Among my new skills are "Armor" (increases protection for the party), "Trapper" (finds traps but also attracts monsters), "Compass" (puts a compass on the screen), "Infravision" (see in the dark), "Light" (same), "Booster" (slowly heals mental damage for the party), "Healer" (slowly heals physical damage for the party), "Regen" (slowly regenerates magic points), and "Sizzle" (prevents magic attacks by opponents but also the party). Switching among them as the situation demands feels very tactical.

   

Good job on Attic's part combating the "all game developers are dorks" stereotype.

     

This skill system, I should point out, is original to the game. I don't think they were influenced by Might and Magic II, the only similar game with individual character skills, just because the skills, the way you acquire them, and the way they work are so different. I quite like Spirit of Adventure's approach.

Beyond that, I didn't do much but explore, fight, level, and (quite often, unfortunately) reload. As I mentioned, I found a dungeon called Rialdo's Castle nestled in some mountains, but I didn't get too far into it before it became clear that the monsters were too tough for me.

     

It was a little too soon for me to be here.

     

I needed some magic, badly, so I concentrated on finding a rune temple where I could use my runes to create spells. I finally discovered it on the north side of the map's central desert.

      

At last!

      

The spell creation system is complicated. There are 18 runes in the game, with names like "Mind," "Fire," "Water," "Combat," and "Death." Each character starts with one, and apparently you can find more by searching, but I've searched dozens of times and found nothing.

       

Every time.

     

To create a spell, you have to specify one rune as the "source," one as the "path," and one as the "goal." When you select a rune for one of the slots, it removes it from your rune "panel" and places it there, making it unavailable for other slots, so I figured the maximum number of potential combinations was 18 x 17 x 16, or 4,896. But based on some info I got later (see below), it appears that the same rune can be used multiple times, making 18 x 18 x 18, or 5,832, possible combinations. I guess that's only possible if you have more than one copy of the same rune. Each character can carry up to 4 runes, or 24 for the whole party, so that makes some sense.

The manual only offers one example: with "Death" as the source, "Fire" as the path, and "Body" as the goal, you can create a flame-based damage spell. I was interested in a healing spell, so looking over the names of the runes, I figured it might go something like "Hardness" as the source, "Magic" as the path, and "Body" as the destination. Or maybe reverse the first two. Either way, I didn't have "Hardness" or "Magic," so that was a no-go.

      

Yeah? Well, your face doesn't make any sense!

     

I spent some time experimenting with the runes I did have--"Mind," "Combat," "Body," "Knowledge," "Fire," and "Water"--but I couldn't come up with any combination that did anything, so I left the temple dispirited. I'll of course return when I have more runes. It's not a bad way to structure a magic system--in some ways, it recalls Ultima V and its use of syllables--but it would have been nice if the manual had provided a couple more examples. Expecting players to suss out every combination on their own is a little unfair.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it would be so spectacularly unfair that the developers likely wouldn't do that. Instead, they'd have NPCs give you some valid combinations. Sure enough, when I returned to Moon City and asked the city's NPCs about SPELLS, the healer and the mage both offered me several combinations. I was wrong about healing; for that, I want "Life" as the source, "Hardness" as the path, and "Body" as the destination. There's a spell that will heal everyone that goes "Life," "Air," "Body." "Seeing," "Knowledge," "Earth" locates stairs in a dungeon. For a light spell, I apparently just want "Light," "Light," "Light," which was my clue that each rune type can be used more than once. I got other recipes for spells that heal minds, awaken slept characters, and create a compass. They all require runes I don't have, so I guess I'll have to keep looking.

       

Saruman offers a recipe.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

• Next to the "skills" list in the character profile is a "language" list. It also has up to six slots, but all my characters speak only "human." This hasn't been an issue so far, but I also haven't found any ways to learn new languages.

• The half a dozen taverns in Moon City all have different names and sell different beverage selections, but they seem to have the same dialogues when talking to the bartenders.

     

This one had a unique drink.

    

• There's a Thieves' Guild in Moon City, but every time I visit, they just kick me out.

             

Granted, there's no "thief" class in the game.

     

• A "seer" in Moon City just seems to take money for useless platitudes.

      

Well, that sure was worth 300 gold pieces.

      

• Overland exploration consumes rations quickly, especially in the desert. The game has an annoying message that pops up frequently as you move through the desert. 

    

I didn't know that spelling it "gawd" existed as early as 1991.

     

• The "Booster" and "Healer" skills work in real-time, not based on your turns, so if you want to heal everyone cheaply, you can just park on a shop screen while the skills are active. (Unfortunately, this doesn't work on enemy encounter screens.) They work pretty slowly, though. I wonder if the effect is compounded if multiple characters have the skills.

• The game gives you the opportunity to save as you enter dungeons or other areas on the outdoor map. It's nice not to have to trek all the way back to Moon City's monastery, but it still keeps a limit on saving.

• The passage of time is maddeningly impossible to measure in this game. I don't see any way to bring up a clock. The only indication of the time of day is whether it's light or dark outside. You can advance time by 10 minutes with a "search," but I have no idea how fast or slow time naturally advances from just standing around, other than it's longer than it's interesting to stare at the computer waiting for it to turn from light to dark and back to light again.

      

Just the message you want to get when you're poisoned and dying.

      

• There's an outdoor enemy called a "Teazerling," and the best I can tell, his only purpose is to be annoying. He never attacks in combat; he just screws around. He dies in one hit and supplies 1 experience point.

      

This guy is an utter waste of time.

     

• The healer in Moon City charges more if you bother him in the middle of the night than if you show up during the day. He even grumbles about it.

          

There's been no real progress on the main plot, unfortunately. When I felt I had plenty of money, I wandered around the slums until I found Grishna the drug dealer again. I paid $1,000 for a hit of Opitar, hoping I could then use the evidence to turn her into Rowena or something, but nothing came of it. The game won't even let me "use" the drug. Maybe it'll come in handy later. Or maybe I'll get arrested for possession.

Time so far: 8 hours

Quarterstaff: Ashen, Redwood, or Maple

I encounter the statue of the titular Setmoth, but not his tomb yet.

      

My suspicions were correct. Once I got off the road and back home, and I had a more comfortable environment with plenty of monitor space, I started to enjoy Quarterstaff a lot more.

That isn't to say that I'm enjoying it as much as an adventure game addict would. When The Adventure Gamer finally gets to it, you'll find a much more thorough account. I like adventure games, but I don't like them nearly as much as RPGs, and I don't have the historical expertise to evaluate them. Although a hybrid, Quarterstaff's strengths are definitely with its adventure game parent.

Since last writing, I've plunged deeper into the Tree Druids' underground fortress, with battles and navigation puzzles rendering progress slow. Fortunately, unless I'm missing huge areas, the puzzles haven't been too difficult. Mostly, you just have to make sure you LOOK AT everything and try to MOVE or PULL just about every fixed object. That seems to ensure that you find most of the secret doors.

The more difficult puzzles have involved splitting the party. There was one of these on the first level. Behind a fountain, I found a brick protruding from a wall--not something a game is likely to call attention to unless it's important. Pulling it wouldn't accomplish anything. I soon discovered that the brick reacted to valuables thrown in the fountain. I took a diamond out of it and threw it back in, and the brick started glowing.

      

A fountain of grotesques.

      

Pulling the brick opened the way to a "mud room," and pulling a "muddy lever" in that room opened the way to a treasure vault. But both doors only stayed open for a couple of turns, meaning that if I took the entire party to the treasure vault, I was trapped with no way out. So I had to split the party into three separate characters, with one staying by the fountain, the second staying in the mud room, and the third venturing into the treasure vault. That way, someone was always available to re-open the doors. Once I finished with the vault and re-united back by the fountain, the individuals could join into a party again.

It's hard to get used to the commands and interface when the characters are split. Each "party" has to specify a command before any of them execute, since their actions are assumed to be simultaneous. As you switch from one party to the next, the map also switches to show your current environs, and the text window switches to show the last bit of text that applied to the specific party. It can get confusing. It would be so much easier if there was an option to permanently "park" one or more of the parties and just make a single party active. Usually, one of them is trying to get something done while the others are just waiting, and it's annoying to have to keep returning to them and typing WAIT.

      

One of my characters left with a light source, plunging the others into darkness.

      

Inventory is still confounding. Every few rooms produces some huge selection of weapons, armor, scrolls, potions, rings, bracelets, and other valuables. The "Identify Wand" helps with scrolls, potions, keys, and wands, but there's nothing that helps determine what weapon does the most damage or what the hell any of these bracelets, necklaces, rings, torques, and other wearables do, if anything. There are so many random valuables that I half expect that towards the endgame, I'll find some kind of vault or magic pool in which I have to toss as many valuables as possible, just like in Zork. I otherwise can't imagine what they're for.

For weapons, I guess you just have to go by name and description. I assumed the "rusted mace" that Bruno found was better than the gnarled tree root he started with, that a "nasty mace" was better than that, and a "mithral mace" was even better than the nasty one. Sword options for Titus, though, have been less obvious, and I have no idea how Eolene is supposed to choose between the redwood staff, the maple quarterstaff, the ashen quarterstaff, and the short quarterstaff.

Some inventory items are, of course, immediately useful. As far as I'm concerned, there aren't enough healing potions in the game. There are a couple of places to get poisoned and a couple of "Cure Poison" potions to help with them. Light sources have to be replenished periodically. Food and drink are necessary after a certain number of turns. A couple of sleeping potions are handy because characters restore all hit points when they sleep, but it takes forever for them to get tired so they'll actually go to sleep. Sleeping potions just knock them out immediately.

      

This is a weirdly-specific use for a potion.

    

As in the last session, I keep running into named NPCs who I feel like I ought to be able to interrogate or talk with, but they just attack me. In a guard chamber, I defeated "Spike Slipshod" and a "punker." A visit to an altar room put me in combat with someone named "Peave." A room near him had "Quenlin" and a "succubus." I would think the very act of giving them names would indicate some importance beyond simply combat, but if there's anything else to do with them, I can't figure it out.

     

The party kills two guys named Boffo and Rufo. Are they druids? Did they kill the druids? There's no way to tell.

      

Combat, meanwhile, remains mostly bland, although there are some equipment options to spice things up. The aforementioned Peave threw some poisoned darts and sleep darts at us, and I was able to throw them back (at both him and other enemies) for a fairly quick kill. Eolene has a bow and is capable of hitting enemies from a distance, something that became important when Peave attacked me from a balcony while I was on the floor below.

I still have nothing to relate in plot terms. I don't know if I'm missing a lot of subtle clues or if there's no exposition, but I've yet to find any NPC with dialogue or any text explaining what's happened here. The lower level did bring me to an altar room with a statue of Setmoth, the presumed villain of the game, but its presence is a bit of a mystery. Did the Tree Druids always worship Setmoth and things went bad? Did they only break into this section of the underground recently, releasing evil forces? Or did something else go wrong?

Let me cover one room in detail to give you a sense of the game. On the lower level, I walk into a "Deadfall room" and immediately hear a click and see a secret door swing open to the west. The secret door is triggered by walking into the room, but it closes after a couple of rounds, forcing me to leave and return. This time, I head west and enter a "guard chamber." This is how the game describes it:

          

Titus's group finds a CARD TABLE, some BUNK BEDS, a MAPLE CHEST, the PUNKER, SPIKE SLIPSHOD, and a burning WALL SCONCE. To the east is the Deadfall Room.

This room is rectangular, twenty paces in length and ten wide. The walls and ceilings are rough hewn granite blocks, solidly mortared together. The subtle use of the natural environs in the Druid Complex is completely absent here. Instead, stone and mortar have conquered the earth, worked with a skill that is magnificent in its raw power. The door of this room is of ancient oak, so old it now feels like solid rock.

              

I try to GREET and SMILE AT the punker and Spike Slipshod, but they just attack. It takes several combat rounds to kill them with my equipped weapons, and they do some damage to Titus. (Enemies somewhat pathologically attack only the party leader.) Once they're dead, I take a look at their inventory. Spike has a smoky potion, a suit of chain mail, and a metal cap. The punker has a leather bludgeon, biker boots, leather armor, a leather dog collar, leather gloves, and a leather helmet.

       

Things descend into violence.

      

I don't know if the bludgeon is a good weapon, but armor pieces have been rare in the game so far. Titus happily puts on the chain mail and metal cap, and Bruno gets the leather armor. 

I then start examining the room. On the card table is a silver key and wine bottle. The silver key opens the maple chest in the same room. (Generally speaking, keys in this game have one use and almost always in the same room or same area where you find them.) The chest has a poison needle in it, which poisons Titus, but it also has a red "Cure Poison" potion. There really wasn't much net gain to that.

The bunk beds have a hole with a deck of Tarot Cards in them; I take them but I don't know what they do. Fiddling with the wall sconce produces nothing, but moving the bunk beds causes the secret door to the east to swing back open. I leave the room.

A few more highlights from encounters and items:

• An "old ring" turns out to be a "Ring of Levitation." It's the key to avoiding damage when walking into rooms with pits, and it also lets you move up and down in rooms with multiple levels.

• An "old scroll" serves like a mark/recall spell, teleporting you to wherever you last read it. Unfortunately, it only teleports the character who has it. Still, it could be used to create a room to stash equipment.

• A "circular room" is a tough beast. It's occupied by a huge granite statue with a "Mace of Destruction," and as far as I can tell, there's no way to beat him. No matter how many times you hit him, his health is fine. If you open any of the four doors in the room, they slam open and temporarily pin the character who opened it, then slam closed the next round. To leave the room, you have to split the party, have one character open a door, have the other two hustle through, then have one of the other two open it from the other side so the first character can follow them. Meanwhile, the granite statue is swinging his mace at everybody. 

   

He also has a "Lock Wand" and a "Potion of Vitality," but I don't like my chances of getting either.

    

• A few rooms have water fountains, troughs, or barrels and are good places to rest. If you get thirsty, hungry, or tired you start taking damage every couple of rounds. 

• An area east of the circular room is divided by pillars into 20 sub-areas, labeled A1 to D5. Some of them have "mines" in them that do horrific damage. One has a pit. One sets off a poison quarrel trap as you walk through a door.

     

This is no fun.

     

Unfortunately, the RPG elements continue to be almost non-existent. I found that my primary weapons skills increased by a percentage point or two the first few times I fought, but they capped in around 43% and stopped increasing after that. There are statistics for "experience," but they don't seem to have any effect on character growth.

But Quarterstaff excels in Infocom's typical strengths. There is a strong sense of place to the dungeon, with evocative room descriptions and areas laid out in a logical manner. Whether I'm looking at an entire room, an altar, or a jeweled dagger, I appreciate the quality of the text. If I don't always know what's happening plot-wise, well neither did the protagonist of Zork. 

      

A piece of my map so far, but click on the link below for the full thing.

        

There aren't any obvious puzzles with which I need help, and I still have several unexplored paths. I've uploaded a PDF of my in-progress game map, and I suppose I'll take a hint if there are any areas that I've clearly missed, but otherwise I'm going to keep plodding along and hope I don't get stuck.

Time so far: 10 hours

 

Game 273: Spirit of Adventure (1991)

     

Spirit of Adventure

Germany

Attic Entertainment Software (developer); Starbyte (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1992 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 12 December 2017

Spirit of Adventure is a potentially-enjoyable title from the minds and hands of Hans-Jürgen Brändle and Guido Henkel, two developers at the cusp of fame. They had cut their teeth on Die Drachen von Laas (1991) and would soon find renown with the Realms of Arkania series, which uses an update of Spirit's interface.

Sprit was originally released in German, and like many German games of the era, it shows a heavy Bard's Tale (1985) influence, particularly in the graphics, the layout of the city, and the approach to combat. But it also shows an awareness of Legend of Faerghail (1990) and has similar elements to Antares (1991), published the same year (I'm not sure which came first). In my experience so far, it makes small improvements on its sources.

The backstory is sketched in the manual and fleshed out as you explore and talk with NPCs. The game is set in the world of Lamarge. The planet's first civilization turned its back on their creators and destroyed itself. The survivors are in the process of re-building and re-discovering old magics. Society is governed by the Cult of Knowing, which studies and makes use of the power of magical runes. The Cult's power is being threatened by the Fraternity of Dreamers, dedicated to trafficking a highly-addictive drug called Opitar. An estimated 20% of the population is addicted, crime is rampant, and "the very fabric of society is endangered." A group of adventurers have been commissioned to track down the source of the drug and stop the machinations of the Dreammaster, the elusive leader of the Fraternity.
     

Rowena, head of the Cult in the starting city, lays it all out. I don't think the runes on her robe actually spell anything.

      
The player assembles a party of six characters. Races and classes are mostly original, though drawn from familiar themes. There are basically four classes, though the male and female versions of the classes have different names (something we saw previously, to some degree, in Faerghail). Warriors and Amazons are the fighting classes, magicians and goddesses the spellcasters, and priests and fairies the clerics. Samurais and banshees serve as warrior/priests.

Races are described in terms of attributes but not appearance, and from the portraits everyone seems to be human. Odinaries are a Nordic race, hardy, clumsy, and stupid. Tidicians are forest barbarians, strong and healthy but ugly and clumsy. Dyce come from cities and have high marks in intelligence and magic. Finally, Allays live in smaller towns and are weaker, but with high charisma and intelligence.
     

Creating a "goddess" character.

      
The races mostly affect the attributes, which are randomly rolled by the computer: body, mind, magic, strength, dexterity, IQ, and charisma.
     
The party starts in Moon City. The city's "monastery" serves in the same fashion as the "adventurer's guild" of Bard's Tale. Only here can you save the game and create new characters. New characters start with a paltry selection of equipment.
     

The monastery is kind of like the "town hall" of Lamarge.

    
The "principal" of the monastery has some words before the party departs. In Moon City, the principal's name is Rowena.

I spent most of the first session simply exploring Moon City, which is a large 32 x 32. Like The Bard's Tale, it has a few important locations mixed within dozens of private homes. Spirit has a fun selection of graphics and NPC comments for those private homes, but you have to try all of them because the essential locations aren't obvious from the outside. 

     

He's awfully polite given that I interrupted his dinner.

This guy is more to the point.

      

The game is graphically more sophisticated than The Bard's Tale, showing details like flower boxes, hung laundry, and carts in front of the homes. Each street and square has a unique name, which is also a fun touch.

  

A shirt dries outside a house on Ordain Boulevard.

     

Key locations are scattered throughout the city and I haven't been able to visit them all yet, partly because there's both a day/night cycle and a day of week cycle that keeps some locations closed. So far, I've found several taverns, a weapons shop, an armor shop, a general goods store, a magic shop, a healer, a thieves' guild, a seer, and a mage who recharges crystals. Thus far, I haven't spent much money.

     

It will be a while before I can afford anything at the magic shop.

What kind of a world closes its taverns on hump day?

       

In one fairly significant improvement over its sources, Spirit of Adventure features NPCs who respond to dialogue keywords. Some of them occupy fixed homes but others wander the streets. Through experimentation, I found that most of them responded to OPITAR, LAMARGE, CULT, DREAMERS, and ROWENA.

       

Bartenders and named NPCs respond to keywords.

      

The first NPC I encountered was named Corbryn. His portrait looked like Oliver Hardy. He offered me a book called Monas Hieroglyphica for 500 gold pieces, and because I misinterpreted my total gold piece reserve as just an individual character's, I thought I had plenty, so I bought it. I couldn't find anything to do with it in my inventory. Later, I met him again in a different part of the city, and he protested that it wasn't his fault that I don't know how to read hieroglyphics, so perhaps the book just exists to get me to waste money. During the first conversation, Corbryn also mentioned that he'd seen a Banshee woman selling Opitar in the city.

     

Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into.

       

I found the Banshee, Grishna, elsewhere on the streets. She offered to sell me some Opitar for 1,000 gold pieces, far more than I have.

      

She also had an oddly angry reaction to a question about Elfrad.

      

In a house, I met Yakka Deepshaved, whose portrait is clearly based on Sean Connery in Highlander. He said he was an elf, which I didn't even know was a race in this setting. He said he'd tell me the name of the head of the Cult of Knowing if I could tell him the name of the mayor of the city of Elfrad. I guess I'll have to return after I visit Elfrad. He also mentioned that Rowena likes to roam the city's streets at night.

       

You call that "deep"? You missed at least two spots!

      

In one major departure from The Bard's Tale and most of its clones, combats are somewhat rare in the opening city. There was maybe one every 5-7 minutes. During combat, characters can make a physical attack, a mental attack, or cast a spell (the latter two depending on class). Antares also had the physical/mental distinction, and I wonder if one game influenced the other. I'll naturally have more on combat in a later entry.

     

Trading blows with some witches and goblins.

    

My characters get pretty battered from combat, and most of my gold so far has gone to the healer, since neither physical nor mental hit points seem to restore over time.

     

This guy is eyeing a second home in Santa Barbara because of me.

        

None of the characters start with spells. I have to create them later in a "rune temple." I'm not sure if the magic system has anything to do with the slate of Futhark runes on the left side of the screen, or otherwise what they're telling me.

        

Also a bit of a mystery is the nature of character development.  You get experience for combat, but to actually level up you have to visit a "mysterious place" somewhere in Lamarge. Supposedly, leveling up improves statistics and allows you to acquire new skills. Every character starts with one magic skill, selected at random I think. I'm not sure if they work automatically or if there's some way to call on them. Some of the skills my characters have aren't described in the manual.

The interface isn't the best. Much of the time, you can select a menu option by pressing the associated number or first letter, but sometimes the developers didn't translate them from German. Any time the game asks "yes/no," for instance, and you want to say yes, you have to press "J" for ja. There's no clear command to "use" inventory items, so I'm not sure how that works. Trading items between characters requires more strokes than it should, and I keep having to look in the manual about how to do it. There appears to be no keyboard shortcut to view a character's inventory (you have to double-click on the portrait), but oddly you have to use the keyboard to get out of the inventory with an undocumented "Q," presumably for "Quit." [Edit: I missed some keyboard shortcuts. They exist, but they require CTRL.] There's no armor class statistic and thus no easy way to see the relative protection offered by armors.

     

My Amazon. This is a useful screen, but there's no obvious way to leave it.

     

There's a navigation issue that I don't know how to describe. When you stand next to a building or door, from the side it looks like you're immediately adjacent to it. But when you turn to face it, it appears that you're one square away. You have to advance to the door and then advance again to enter. If you only advance once, then turn, the game moves you one square away again. It's not crippling, but it takes some getting used to.

Before I wrapped up this session, I took one of the four exits from Moon City and found myself on a top-down overland map. Presumably I'll find other cities and dungeons here. I have no idea how big the game is. It would be nice if not all the maps were so big.

        

The overland world of Lamarge.

       

Before I forget, I need to thank a reader named Jan for providing me with a spoiler-free English version of the manual and for otherwise doing some initial scouting on the game and its versions. Apparently, the C64 version is a travesty that we'll have to later explore.

        

My map of Moon City.

       

"The Bard's Tale but with more plot, Ultima-style dialogue, and fewer combats" sounds like a great game, and I look forward to seeing how this one shapes up. I could see it becoming very hard, with no clear way to level up and nowhere to save except the monastery. By next time, we'll know.

Time so far: 4 hours

****

SSI's Realms of Darkness was supposed to be Game #273, but I can't get any version working. Every C64 version I download insists that there's something wrong with the disk drive when I boot the game. Every Apple II version allows me to create characters but then complains that "characters exist" already on the adventure disks and gives me no ability to delete them. If you've ever gotten the game running and can educate me on how, I'd love your help. Until then, I think I have to list it as "not playable." [Edit: I eventually got my answers and played it years later, starting here.]

   

****

 

For further reading: 

My coverage of attic Entertainment Software's other titles:

    

• Lords of Doom (1990) 
• Die Drachen von Laas (1991)
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992) 
• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994) 

04/28/2026